All my big bads tend to be grinning. Or, rather, laughing mad. At least by the time the party gets to fight them, anyway.

Had this one guy in my M&M campaign, insectoid alien who was named "The Geneticist" (they name you after your job, okay?) who was basically Hojo from Final Fantasy VII, except that he usurped control of his ENTIRE SPECIES (not that many were left) and, over time, steadily made himself more human in an effort to master the forces of magic, since he felt science alone could only go so far and his species apparently couldn't use magic.

When the party first meets him, half his face is still insectoid, he only has patches of hair on his head and he's rather grim.

By the end of the campaign, he's he's got long and greasy hair, appears mostly human aside from pure black eyes and chitinous/bony growths in places and he is HAMMING IT UP!

And to hell with being super heroes, after this guy used an ENTIRE CITY as guinea pigs, including abducting half the party, they broke out the lethal force.

His last act before the final battle was to mind control the few surviving members of his species into making a suicide charge on the US army as a DISTRACTION. He died in a drawn out beating, capped with getting a sword through his chest, while his ship was steadily sinking into a lake and all of his plans had been thwarted.

I'm still surprised the party didn't cut him apart piece by piece, but by that point the sociopathic characters (and players) had been removed.

He wasn't quite a Big Bad, mostly just a recurring minor villain, but there was a psychotic half-elf warlock/rogue who my party both loved and hated. Think of him as the bastard child of Jan from Hellsing Abridged and Iago from Othello; a bizarre amalgam of eloquence, bloodlust, profanity wrapped up in a shiny finish of stark raving madness. To top it all off, he had this creepy-ass chuckling grin that even made our most power-gamery of power-gamers stop and rethink a straight-up attack. This was mostly because the first time he tried that, his character was attacked repeatedly in the groin with a necrotic spell to the point where he was rendered impotent. We were all kinda sad when we finally killed him off, though. Good memories.

Well, it's not like the pegasi control weather like magic. It's a much more "hands-on" process. And the point here was not to separate her from friends, but to stop friends from interfering with the psychological pressure being applied.

Actually, I'd say that it might even be more stressful for them, because if you remember, they point out that Pegasi can't control the weather in the forest in the first episode. So something that would normally be no problem at all would suddenly be something they can't deal with

Well, I don't think it's ever been established that pegasi CAN'T control Everfree's weather; rather, it's been established that Everfree doesn't NEED the pegasi to do it. Though, I would imagine that anything the pegasi do in that forest wouldn't stay that way for long...

There was this campaign where we were all recruited by a Planeswalker to find some tower at the center of the universe. Or something, it was kind of convoluted. Well, after being issued our starting equipment and cutscenes, (I received a POINTY STICK and not much else) we started out in a desert town, and some minor shenanigans happened...and then we heard some asshole laughing maniacally in the distance.

We ended up having to head across the desert for three days, and ended up at a gas station for some reason. (In the process, I destroyed my shirt in the attempt of making an impromptu umbrella or fan, I forget which. I spent the rest of the campaign topless.) Well, the laughing started up again, and the gas station got overrun with zombie goasts (literally, we needed ghost touch crystals attached to our weapons to kill them) so we had to go into the basement and hole up with some kid named Bill.

When we finally left the gas station, with the kid, the laughing kept happening, and we actually saw the guy laughing this time. So we followed him, into a tunnel. Which showed our characters' various deaths (the planeswalker at the start had resurrected us). Every single one of the deaths was caused by THE SAME LAUGHING ASSHOLE.

We made it through the tunnel, to a bridge, which was partly collapsed or something because we could only cross single file. And of course, zombie horde. Bill ended up dying here, taking out the bridge with him somehow. We moved on, did some other stuff somehow involving lobster goblins or something (everyone except me ate some) and also journeys into alternate planes that gained us two new party members, and eventually reached this door in the middle of nowhere. Everyone but me went through (I did as well when the plane started collapsing) and we ended up in modern-day New York City. (My character acquired some penicillin due to, after some shenanigans whilst rescuing the party members in the lobster goblin area, having acquired ranks in Knowledge:[Name of party member from future Earth])

After some MORE shenanigans we ended up at a construction site being chased by ghosts, encountered a ghost version of the DURGON from my character's past (which I killed by saying "Hey, look up!" causing it to look up at an equally ethereal meteor that basically flattened it) and eventually went through another portal at the top.

After THAT, we FINALLY caught up with that laughing asshole, who...gave us a tarot reading and spontaneously combusted.

I put some of his ashes in a jar on the off chance it'd be useful. I ended up giving them to the planeswalker and getting nothing in return.

Hang on, you got a...
*dun-dun-dunnnnn*
POINT-ED STICK?!?!
I hope that laughing asshole forgot his blueberries...
Also, you faced zombie goasts? Were you having to live up to your FULL LIFE CONSEQUENCES?

Well, my sister is openly ripping off Star Trek for her nautical campaign, so I don't see how using a from-what-I-hear-decent series by Stephen King. It's actually a lot of fun to base a setting, session, or even just a single character after something your players might recognize. In my campaign, I just added a blatant ripoff of Batman, except he's completely, psychotically evil. (Basically, his technique and mannerisms are the same as Batman, but he's a murderous lunatic.)

He's a washout from an elite assassin program, except he wasn't kicked out for any kind of lack of competence, they kicked him because he's a genocidal maniac bent on destroying his entire race because he believes that his race's presence on the plane is disrupting the fabric of their native plane. (Those familiar with Shardmind lore probably recognize this as the evil background option for Shardminds.) He's also ON THE SAME SIDE as the PCs, who knew about this before they even met him. Well, they didn't know and still DON'T know about the assassin washout bit (the assassin group he washed out from has been harrying them from time to time, though, so the reveal on that one should be good).

It does. I had my suspicions when he was talking about the trek through the desert chasing the Dark... Laughing Man. The oasis/gas station sequence was also pretty much spot on, but the penicillin and Lobstrocities were also direct ripoffs.

In the Stephen King book, the Dark Man is similarly anticlimactic when the Gunslinger catches up with him. He just has a weird conversation with him about how their world is a microverse contained in a dying stalk of grass on Earth, and the Dark Tower connects upwards to the other worlds. Then he dies. No fighting, no great climactic battle... Just an old guy trying to flee the death of his reality and failing who accidentally dragged the Gunslinger along for the ride.

So yeah, your GM might want to be a little less transparent next time.

I am running a "New Gods of Mankind" game. The concept is pretty much a mix of Black and White 2, RISK, and The Sims.

After a warm up campaign in the DM guide (Or 'Fate's Handbook') I have started a new campaign by taking everything they left unfinished, and mixing it with the first arc of Bionicle lore.

It took six sessions before even one character caught on, dispite the elemental gods AND the god of shadows having names all but identical to their cannon versions, and it was only because one of the godly artifacts they ran across was a tribal mask.

Fortunately, it was in a note, and he didn't tell anyone else. He admiteded to having seen the first ten minutes of the movie or so, and knew nothing else about it, so as a reward for figuring it out, and a bribe for not quitting/looking up the rest of the lore/telling the rest of the party, I told him he could use what little he knew as in character knowledge from his god's spiritual studies.

Turned out well, but could have gone badly, I was nervous.

Because as we all know, the key to origonality is in how well you hide your sources.

Not that bad, I ment more like, "Our god wants us to do this... so we do this. Questioning him is bad for one's health."

All the other player characters are also gods, with their own groups of followers, and so are several NPCs in the nearby territories. You can be successful no matter what you are a god OF, it's just that sometimes a god of war can solve a problem a bit more quickly than a god of Knowledge. Thus, Black and White 2.

The Sims is more, "Let's keep incidents between our own followers to a minimum. Keep them happy, and keep them busy."

Yeah, but belief, what fuels your powers, doubles as your life source, so you gain a big vulnerability. If you have no followers, either by them dying off, or being converyed, or what have you, you have to way to refuel, or heal if you prefer to look at it that way.

Well... Other than converting fuel types to Terror, but that's not really a good idea. Using Terror can turn you into a Leviathan, and all gods have been tasked by FATE personally to either capture, or destroy any and all leviathans they encounter. And if the gods are losing... well, that might just be what it takes to get FATE to leave his/her/it's/whatever's throne and do something personally for once, something that has not happened since the creation of the first gods, and the mere threat of which ended a centuries long war between two of the ELDER gods.

One trick I use when I DM, indeed one I've applied to the excellent creator of this webcomic himself, is to use the player's knowledge of your source material AGAINST them. If your players think they know what's going on, you can easily mislead them. For example, if they think you are running a game shamelessly inspired by Lord of the Rings - imagine their surprise when Gandalf turns out to be Saruman in disguise! Then they'll facepalm for not realizing what two white wizards with long flowing beards meant when taken on its own. Of course it was a trick, but because they think it's stealing from LOTR they'll never see it coming. Great way to break players of the meta-gaming habit.

Or, you can get even more devious. If your player knows what's going on and they know YOU know THEY know what's going on... It's a great mind game. For example, Newbiespud and I designed an adventure together at the same time he was playing in my own weekly game. We designed a chamber with a rolling bolder and a pit that seemed to be safe, but really had a gelatinous cube in it for the unwary player to dive into. Imagine his sudden frenzied paranoia when he saw an identical chamber next week in my own game, the one he played in. It seemed identical to the one we designed together, so he knew SOMETHING had to be different... A deliciously fun situation and psychological puzzle. Can you outguess the DM?